enCYCLONEpedia: The Penalty Picture

By Kirk Haaland of enCYCLONEpedia.com Follow Kirk on Twitter @Khaal53 There were a number of ugly facets to the Cyclones game on Saturday with Oklahoma and thankfully one of them was not the scoreboard. Iowa State kept the Sooner offense in check and out of the end zone — even when it came to the vaunted “Belldozer” (which succeeded roughly half the time despite the hype of one ESPN writer that I exchanged tweets with on Saturday). The Cyclone offense struggled to get receivers open and move the ball consistently, while turnovers were also a problem. The other glaring issue on the day was penalties, specifically false starts.  With a few people asking if I had been tracking false starts this year (I hadn’t), I figured it would be a worthwhile venture to dive into just how bad penalties have been with a focus on the false starts. First the criteria I used:  I only counted penalties that were accepted. I considered a penalty to be a “drive killer” by the offense somewhat subjectively ...